4x5 Peelapart Instant Film and other Large Format Photographic topics.

Friday, February 28, 2014

Updated News: (was Coming soon) New55 FILM IS LIVE ON KICKSTARTER

UPDATED ON MARCH 22, 2014, and again on MARCH 23, 2014

Monday Today is the day! The link to Kickstarter will be is here and, I hope, everywhere you place it. We are counting on you to spread the news of this exciting, complex, incredibly interesting, and risky endeavor. Some things to keep in mind:

We expect that some people will not immediately understand that the shipped price of the Kickstarter funded reward includes the same dollar amount (about $240,000) that we have talked about for tooling and material development.

This leads to the inevitable question about the price-per-shot once the Kickstarter-funded phase is over. Won't that be unfair to those who paid a big premium during the startup? "No" is the answer, since the assumption is that those who are interested in assisting the creation of New55 FILM as a going business will do that specifically because they want to be able to order New55 FILM and use it in the future. So the post-Kickstarter price-per-shot will be less than during the Kickstarter period, assuming things go as planned.

Also keep in mind that New55 FILM is doubly valued because it produces a print, which is worth something, AND a negative, which has its price.

People ask if I think that we will raise the needed money, and I have to tell them I just don't know. We have done a lot of polling and market research, and in summary, it appears the older users of T55 have a lower cost-per-sheet pain point than those who are discovering large format, darkroomless photography for the first time. Also, there is a large price perception gap between the US and Europe, with Europeans much better shielded from the dollar price we infer. On the other hand, our support from Europe could be less than we would like because Paypal is not accepted by Kickstarter: This is something that project CEO Sam Hiser is understandably concerned about as it does cut off one available purchase avenue that I and millions of others prefer.

So wish us luck and please send this pre-Kickstarter news around. Monday March 24 at 8pm EST is the likely "go" time, and we'll run it for about a month.